disLEXia

Wednesday, 22. January 2003

Seems this was an exciting week.

It surly was an exciting week for me, my wife and our older son. My wife has given birth to our second son and I stayed for a week with her in the hospital. Since the newborn and his mother spend most of the time sleeping, I hat a lot of time to do some reading which seeded my mind with a lot of interesting ideas.

Meanwile there seems to be happening a lot at the internet-leagal-cpyright-security nexus.
10:08 | permanent link | mail this

Research on Open Spam Relays

At http://www.m5computersecurity.com/research/OpenRelay-analysis-1.2.htm I found an interesting paper by Michael McCafferty titled "Statistical Analysis of Open E-mail Relaying on the Internet". The Author was scanning mailservers for open relays. Using random IPs he found 1.6% of the Mailservers beeing open relays. In contrast in DSL address ranges he found up to 35.7% open relays. I like Ross Andersons idea of drawing parallels betweenNetwork Security and the Environment.

While "don't let the masses on the Internet" thinking is nothing new this numbers lets one rethink the issue in an different light. This open relay thing is really a difficult problem. On the one hand my sympathy is with John Gilmore, on the other hand people who can't configure their mailservers and incerase the mail filtering load on me and my machine.

The other thing I like about this paper researes some facts instead of doing speculations. It is not the first scan for vulnaribilities nor the first for open relays. It just reminds me that in cybercriminology we can do experimental research without getting in real bad ethical troubles.
21:21 | permanent link | mail this

So CSS is not about anti-piracy.

After wondering why CSS is called an "anti piracy measure" I got a nice explanation at Freedom To Tinker and found basically my understanding of CSS dupported at several places.

Ross Anderson describes CSS as:

For example, the DVD Content Scrambling System was used as a means of insisting that manufacturers of compatible equipment signed up to a whole list of copyright protection measures.

So CSS is just for one thing: enforcement of the terms of a cartel/monopoly. This terms seem to include a fistfull of customer unfriendly measures like region codes/no advertising skipping/copy protection. It is aimed at the producers of DVD players, not at the consumer. So CSS is a tool used to enforce player builders to implement -beside others - anti-piracy measures. Doing so might be illegal cartel action.

Still I see CSS called a anti-piracy meassure in most media. Even worse cluful media calls CSS a security measure or something like this and usually does not point out that CSS is about enforcing a monopoly not about copy protection.
23:54 | permanent link | mail this

disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif